Last year, to cover its rear after cutting poor ol' Costco a $3 million check to open a North Dallas location, the city dangled the same amount in front of big-name grocers in the hopes they'd plant a store or two in a southern Dallas food desert. No one at Dallas City Hall really thought it would gin up much business — and they were right — but at least they could say they tried. Because when your residents are hungry or sick and dying from eating all the wrong stuff, it's the thought that counts.

When no one called the city's bluff, officials trekked down to Houston and New Orleans with the American Heart Association to see how they're trying to green up their food deserts. Which is perplexing, since the instruction manual sits open in our own backyard: Bonton Farms, the urban farm created in 2014 by Daron Babcock, a former Friscoan who ditched a lucrative job in private equity to start Bible study and plant food and hope in the Bexar Street dirt.

Dallas City Hall, forever searching for ways to provide healthier food to the city's south, seldom talks about Babcock's resurrection of a dead-end street that's now a land of milk and honey, not to mention eggs, meat and various shades of greens. Perhaps it's like the good book says: A prophet is not without honor except in his own country and in his own house.

Babcock has been trying to wring some pennies out of City Hall since he planted his first seed three years ago. Finally, the city is ready to invest.

It's not a lot, at least by City Hall's usually generous standards; certainly not the $3 million Costco got in bulk. But it's enough, Babcock said Monday, to finish funding the long-hoped-for market and cafe at the entrance to the farm — $100,000, about a quarter of what it will cost to build the 3,000-square-foot facility in a part of town where most residents get their meals from the corner liquor store.

Two renderings of Bonton Market, which Daron Babcock hopes will begin construction within the next six weeks.

The cafe and market will serve as the entrance to Bonton Farms on Bexar Street

Bonton Farms has always depended upon the kindness of strangers to grow his crops — dollars collected through the Dallas Foundation and other generous charities, and, recently, the donation of expansive acreage from a man who owns a southeast Dallas concrete plant. For the market, Babcock went to the city hoping to get a bite of the $3 million set aside for those grocery stores — a tease he always thought was "ridiculous" because, as he put it over lunch Monday, "we're masters at hitting the bull's-eye of the wrong target."

Meaning: One grocery store isn't going to pull people out of poverty. Or provide them jobs. Or teach them how to eat better. But a farm can — better still, a farm with a market and a cafe selling healthy food at prices residents can afford.

"We have double the rate of cancer down here," he said. "We have double the rate of strokes. Double the rate of heart disease. Double the rate of diabetes. Double the rate of child obesity in Dallas County. That doesn't happen overnight. It happens over decades, and so the thought that all of the sudden you put a store there and that will change things ...?"

He shook his head and grinned ruefully through his ever-present stubble.

"The city treats the food desert thing as separate from poverty," he said. "And it's not."

Daron Babcock in 2014, when Bonton Farms was still more dream than reality,

(Andy Jacobsohn/Staff Photographer)

The city's offering a grant from the South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund, which, for years, was a money pit the city didn't adequately fill because it was just too "complicated." If the Bonton Market passes the council next week — and I can't imagine it won't, because no one's that short-sighted — that $100,000 will be the best investment the trust fund's ever made.

"This is something we and other agencies will find ways to support in the future," said Karl Zavitkovsky, head of Dallas' Office of Economic Development. "What's not to like about what this guy has done?"

The market will sell goods straight from the farm; Babcock is also in talks with a major grocer about using their cashier system so clerks can train at his little market and work their way up the food chain. The cafe will serve breakfast and lunch prepared by neighborhood cooks who envision futures spent in the kitchen, an extension, perhaps, of the program begun by Chad Houser at Cafe Momentum downtown. There will be parenting classes, too, and health and wellness courses and diabetes testing and yoga on the farm.

"Anything that gets people invested in becoming a better, healthier person," he said. "There's incredible value — socially, culturally — in people just being able to break bread together. And there's not a single place in our community to do that."

Babcock envisions dozens of Bonton Markets taking root across the city, desert lilies blooming in places no one else dares plant. But he has to get the first one built. Babcock hopes to begin construction within six weeks, but who knows: He's waiting on the green light from City Hall, to which he paid extra money to expedite permits he still doesn't have.